American Deathways: Meaning of Death in the American Indian society

by

Claudia Casagrande

Inhaltsverzeichnis

INTRODUCTION 3

AMERICAN INDIANS - GENERAL FACTS 4
American Indian Statistics concerning Death 5

FORMS OF AMERICAN INDIAN DEATH 7
American Indian suicide 7
American Indian Homicide/Parricide 8
American Indian Infanticide 10

DEATH IN AMERICAN INDIAN HISTORY 11

AMERICAN INDIAN DEATH RITES 12
Tradition 12
Present Day 16

EXAMPLE: THE NAVAJO NATION 16

DEATH IN AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE 20
Mythologies 20
Modern literature 22

ENDING 31

Literatur

Introduction

To examine the meaning of death in the American Indian society, it is neces-sary to know about the general facts of American Indians. First of all, it is not pos-sible, to write about any topic concerning " the American Indian society", because there is not one single culture for all those different American Indian nations. The following paper uses examples and explanations from all Indian tribes and, even tough there is a huge diversity, the common endured history and today′s American Indian inner fights between past and tradition unite all North American Indians to some kind of "American Indian society."

To approach the topic of death after common information, a focus on North American Indian statistics concerning death will follow. These statistics will show the differences in life expectations literally and metaphorically. Whereas some specific forms of American Indian death, like infanticide, disappeared through the centuries, others, well known likewise in "white" and "black" society, such as homi-cide and suicide, changed their causes, but consist within and outside the reserva-tion boundaries.

As the causes of death altered since the colonization of America, death has also become a new face for the American Indians. Skirmishes between tribes changed to extinguishing wars between "new" Americans and "native" Americans. The surviving American Indians were forced to leave their homelands and move to special reservation areas. Thereby, the traditional death rites modified through a change of living conditions, surroundings, and environment.

To recall all the gathered aspects of "American Indian death ways", the Navajo nation as today′s largest American Indian tribe, will serve as example to review and explain old rites, changes their gone through, and history′s effects on their present day appearance.

At the end of the journey through various aspects of the meaning of death for the American Indian society, examples from four American Indian authors shall highlight the importance of death as well in American Indian daily life, as in their history and their philosophy.

American Indians - General Facts

Today, North American Indians are U.S. American citizens - but that has not always been the case, even though they are the native born inhabitants of Amer-ica. The citizenship for American Indians exists not before 1924. Until 1938, seven States refused to allow Indians to vote. In Arizona and New Mexico, the American Indians had to go to court to win their voting rights in 1948.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Census in July 1999, 0.9 percent of the U.S population are American Indian, which is 2,396,000 people (including Inuit and Aleut). The four States with the most Indian residents are Oklahoma, California, Arizona and New Mexico. Since the last two decades, the number of American Indians is on the rise (in 1980 the total American Indian population was 1,478,523 ).

The development in the last hundred years has not been easy to measure, because of the problematic classification procedure. The important question to receive good quality numbers is: Who is an American Indian? Researchers agreed recently: An American Indian is everyone who identifies oneself as American In-dian. This identification is also the clue to the development of the significant rise in number of the American Indian population. It is not just a baby boom - comparing old data with recent enumeration, social scientists conclude that a significant num-ber of people who in the past identified with other races, have begun to view themselves as American Indian.

This leads to another problem, not just the counting, but also describing the American Indian is not that simple. One cannot speak of the specific cultural pat-terns of "the American Indian", because of the cultural diversity between the vari-ous tribes. In the United States, there are more than 550 federally recognized tribes, which means that these groups have a so called "special legal relationship" with the U.S. government.

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